INTRANET TOUR | Highlights from MBHs Transition to Synthesis 6

Hello and welcome. My name is Susan Strom and I'm the Chief Client Officer here at Knowledge Architecture. And with me today is Hilary Thompson, the Director of Brand Communications at MBH Architects. You are in an intranet tour where we share stories of how clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their AEC firms. Today, Hilary is going to introduce us to Archie, MBH's synthesis intranet, which has recently received a refresh as part of their transition to synthesis 6. She's going to share how employees use ARCHI to find expertise across MVH's US and India offices, inspiring examples of scaling, technical design, learning across the business, and synthesis six transition strategies and lessons learned. We'll save the last 15 minutes for questions. A little bit about Hillary. Since joining MBH in 2014, Hillary has been devoted to elevating and promoting the firm's brand. As the Director of Brand Communications. Her ability to craft compelling visual narratives and design efficient systems for information management are the driving force behind her success in optimizing communication strategies, a strong component of continuous improvement. Hillary is passionate about knowledge management, has a proven track record for leading MBH through organizational change, including the design and implementation of two generations of their firm's intranet. Hillary, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing what you're up to with synthesis. I'd like to start by just inviting you to tell us a little bit about mbh so everyone here has some context for the organization.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Susan, and hello to everybody on the call. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to to join today. I hope there are some things of interest, a little background on MBH. We've been around since 1989. We have a little bit over 200 employees practicing across our five offices here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, New York, Mumbai and Bengaluru. We offer architecture and integrated services like fixture design and environmental graphics in a number of different practice areas. Everything from multifamily housing to labs to workspace to retail, and much, much more. And because we're spread across so many time zones and often the work that our teams do is very different, knowledge sharing platforms like Synthesis have been really integral to connecting our offices and our teams and our programs.

Thank you. And you're obviously a marketing leader. How does the intranet and maybe also knowledge management, how do you see that fitting into your role?

Yeah, so my connection to synthesis and knowledge management stems I think, both from personal interest and also this kind of inherent synergy between marketing and knowledge sharing. When I started with MBH A little over nine years ago, there were a few firm leaders that urged me to attend this incredible conference called kaconnect. Maybe some of you have heard of it. And I was so inspired by everything that I learned there and everyone that I met, the generosity of that community of people and the amount of things that I was able to take back to the firm. As a marketer, you have to know what's going on in every corner of the firm, every little nook and cranny. And you have to be able to tell people not just about the projects that your firm has designed, but also about what your firm knows and what it is about how you do things that makes you difference. And then lastly, as a graphic designer, I'm very, very interested in user experience design and the kind of functional layering organization of information. So all these things kind of combined led me to take interest in this and take on a leadership role in how MBH uses synthesis. So before I bore you to tears here, with my personal background, I am going to go ahead and share screen and we can get started with the tour.

Awesome. And we're seeing your screen.

Awesome. So welcome to Archi. We're calling it Archie 4.0 because this is the fourth generation of our intranet. We've had two WordPress intranets before getting synthesis in 2018, I believe, which was a complete and total game changer for us. We at that time had one office and very rapidly expanded to five offices. So synthesis became a way that we share internal information, but also a way that we share culture across our offices. So as you can see in our setup here, we optimize the number of posts that you see as soon as you sign on. And people are really sharing a variety of different things. So you have everything from technical learning here, types of building construction. A post here by yours truly as part of this series that we're doing to help employees acclimate to the new environment. And then of course, things like information about our review process and about cross office philanthropy events and kudos to employees. But I wanted to share one post in particular with you. This is a post coming out of our Mumbai office in celebration of our 34th anniversary, which was just a few weeks ago. And the employees there posted all of these amazing photos and it's a window into life there. It's a way to see how firm culture translates to another office. And it's a way to kind of get to know people outside of just the zoom screen and email. I think in returning to work, a lot of Us remember that human connection is really important to our work and the way that we do projects and it's not always the easiest thing to do when you're halfway around the world. So getting to know people in this different way has definitely benefited our relationships. You can also see by the professionalness of the photo ops here, they're going to take my job in marketing pretty soon here, but I'm scrolling all the way to the bottom really, because I wanted you to see the amount of interaction that's happening with these posts. So you can see 47 people have liked this post. It's only been up for a few weeks and people are commenting. So this is something that we're really engaged with and I'm really happy to see and get to know my colleagues a little bit better. Next, I wanted to move on to our employee profiles. Again, Synthesis 6 has been amazing here in terms of the editability of profiles directly by employees. For those of us that had synthesis prior and a lot of the information living in vantage point, this is a really huge difference having people input their own info. So one field I wanted to point out is just this little pronounce my name field. That was something we added in the last year. We have employees representing 28 different countries around the world and it's been cool to be in a meeting, maybe not know how to pronounce someone's name and show them that respect by quickly being able to reference that and, you know, promoting a inclusive, polite culture among employees. But I what I really wanted to focus on with these employee profiles is this I can help with section. So these are both custom fields, software skills and professional skills. We divided them into those two categories because there are so, so many things. These are dropdown menus that we used to standardize the naming convention of things for how we're going to leverage them in other places within the site that I'll show you in just a moment. But to start off, we created these lists of skills that employees may have. We vetted them with our principal leadership directors, senior associates, and not only did that make the kind of creation process inclusive, but it also allowed us to do some internal marketing of this feature pre launch and get people excited about it. So the titling of things here, the I can help with was very intentional on our part. In the past, when we've asked employees about skills, we've asked questions like what are you proficient at? Or what are you an expert at? And we found that a lot of those things either got too much information or too little information. And MBH's culture is very, very, very much one of helping others around you. We have a very non competitive culture where you really get ahead by helping other people. So this I can help with terminology. It reinforces our culture, but it also kind of got at what people feel comfortable, you know, saying, I know enough about this that I can help someone else with this. And I'll show you where we're leveraging that across our technology pages. So for both design, technology, business applications and other places across the site, we have pages that have this kind of standardized view and they have this directory that is populating based on that custom field. So anybody that identified Bluebeam as a skill in their profile will have it show up here. So that if someone is needing help, they can of course go to our design technology manager. But they also have resources around them and it's a way for colleagues to engage with each other when they may not otherwise interact. And it's also a way for employees to feel really comfortable asking for help. If a person has self identified, I can help with this. That means that they're obviously open to helping you with that. So it's created that kind of relationship building that we wanted on here. And I mentioned internal marketing, which we did pre launch for this field. We've also continued to reinforce the functionality as we've launched it with these Archie tips posts. So explaining to employees, again, this is the field, this is how you can use it. With building Archie, I think we, you know, we, we often get so in depth with things that we forget that the functionality may not be apparent to all employees. So continually putting these features in front of them has been really critical for us. Another field that we added to employee profiles that functions similarly is this project Experience field. We allow employees to put what they may have specialized in under previous association in this field. And we're using that, say I get an RFP one day for a project that is very closely aligned with what we do, but maybe not like exactly in our wheelhouse as a firm. And I want to find a project manager that maybe specialized in that project type before coming to mbh. I can now look in this directory and, and understand who may have that experience. Adoption of our employee profile section has been really wonderful. When we launched, we allowed an allocated amount of time for employees to fill out their profile. We got a lot of questions in particular about filling out the about Me section. So you can see in our little intranet 101 guide, we created a section specifically for helping employees populate that part of their profile. It is often uncomfortable talking about yourself, especially in front of your colleagues. So just something to help people along. And the other thing that we've done that has really helped keep profiles up to date is make it part of our annual review process. So we do group reviews. A lot of people within the firm participate in those group reviews. And for each person, we pull their Archie profile up on the screen as the discussion is taking place, so that their photo is there and a little bit of information. We did this with synthesis 5 as well. And we knew that people were updating their profile because we would get a flurry of emails about updating vantagepoint. That of course, is no longer the case because employees are able to edit that information directly. So if nothing else, employees are updating those twice a year, which is great. The next section that I wanted to talk about on here is our technical content. With each generation of the intranet being launched, we have tried to help employees see see things in a new light. So when we got Synthesis, it became about socialized learning and the ability of everyone to contribute to the intern. For a long time, the intranet was seen as an operational resource, right? There's lots of great information that you need to be an employee, but maybe not as much information about things that you need in order to do your job as an architect or operational professional. So with the last couple of years and also with the launch of Archi 4.0, we wanted to help employees see ARCHI as an architectural resource, as a resource for technical learning. We have a technical design director at mbh, Kevin Alba. He's a principal, he's an architect, and he's our resident code expert. He leads all of our technical training programs for the firm. We have an internal corporate university program called Framework, which Kevin leads and he also holds office hours weekly for anyone in the firm to come to him with a code question, a technical question, and use his 30 odd some years of expertise executing a variety of different project types. And what he's done is committed to regularly sharing information related to maybe common questions that he's getting areas where he thinks that people would otherwise benefit from information and he's posting those things to Archie, all with a common hashtag, which is how they're posting to this page here. We also set up the page so that if you're looking for a specific topic, say I want to know something about accessibility. I can also sort by that topic. In particular, I myself find that I find these posts incredibly helpful for the work that I do, even in marketing you know, we spend a lot of time describing what architects do and how they do it. And being able to understand all these concepts much more in depth has benefited me quite a bit. So I can only imagine how much it is benefiting our staff as they grow their architectural career. And speaking of the program that I mentioned, our internal university program that Kevin Alba administers is the lead instructor for Framework. It was something that started in when we had one office. It's a semester long program originally aimed at helping job captains create high quality sets of drawings. Since then it has expanded to include all of our offices. Kevin teaches the lessons now over Zoom. And as part of the program, the students are all required to post lessons to archi. This has been really incredible for the amount of technical content that's on archi. It provides kind of an evergreen source of technical content. You can see how recent a lot of these posts are. But it's also done this thing where we've democratized who can post technical content. People feel, you know, more included and more people are included in the sharing of this information, which is really powerful. And I'll go into one of the posts in particular, a recent one, just to kind of show you what they're all about here. The other benefit of this way of doing things is it provides a mechanism for someone that we consider an expert, Kevin, to validate these posts and show that they are, you know, accurate and thorough and that we are delivering the information that we want to deliver to staff. So as an example about how this is directly benefit fitted our project teams, a few weeks ago in a meeting, one of the directors told us that he is finding that when team members on his team are asking him questions that he's remembering these posts and instead of sitting down and explaining the concept from scratch, he is referring employees directly to these lessons. So for him, that ensures that the employee is getting a really thorough explanation. It's also saving him a lot of time. So win, win. And that's more than we really could have hoped for with all of these technical posts and really happy to hear that they are being operationalized in everyday use within the firm. And then the third section here that I wanted to show you today really has a lot to do with user experience, design and rethinking the way that we navigate the site. I think I've probably already said six times that we went from one office to five, but that was really critical here in particular because our intranet platform grew with us as an organization. When we built the first generation, we had one office. And then as we expanded, we didn't really change the navigation model. So it became you would go to medical insurance and then find your office and go to dental insurance and then find your office, and so on and so forth. And so in reimagining our navigation and our user experience, we decided to do this kind of one stop shopping for everything related to, say, benefits for an office. It also makes it so that the employee doesn't have to already know what information they're looking for. I might not have any idea what the full array of benefits that are available to me are and thus not know how to search for them. So in that way it's informative. We also made sure that we didn't use proper nouns for these items. So for instance, an employee, you know, doesn't have to know that their health plan might be called Kaiser. All they have to do is know to search for or choose the medical tab here on the navigation. Another thing that we did here with the redesign is assign these icons to things we went through. And we decided that we for the most part preferred solid icons as a way of just providing some visual clarity on the page. And we created a library to use in the construction of the intranet. My colleague went through and meticulously labeled all of the icons, which was a really great way to create consistency throughout the site. So thinking about the user experience, if we have a help icon that is repeated across all of the pages, from IT to technical learning to HR pages, et cetera, et cetera, the employee kind of learns that visual symbol for things and it becomes a little bit easier to navigate. We put them all in our red brand color and it just helped the page kind of have a nice clean clarity to it. And we took this same approach with pages about facilities. These were something that we started on previous generations of the intranet, but have grown in synthesis. 6 We've consolidated a lot of pages and had them roll up here. So again, it's one stop shopping for everything involved with the office. We originally kind of created these with new hires in mind. But as we as we grew as an organization and as we started doing a lot more inter office travel, these pages became really helpful for that as well. Say I am going to work in our New York office tomorrow morning. I can immediately know where I will find access to the WI fi or if I need to find where my colleague sits in that office. Everything is just clearly laid out for me on these pages. So that is a little bit about Archie and how we are leveraging synthesis six at mbh, I am going to stop sharing. I think Susan and I are going to talk a little bit about Archie. Archie in process.

Yeah, thank you so much for that, Hilary. And as a reminder to everyone who's joined us, if you have questions for Hilary, please drop them in the Q and A panel and feel free to vote on questions that interest you. That way we can see where interest is and spend our time there. And yeah, let's talk a little bit about process. So, Archie 4.0, you took synthesis five and moved it to synthesis six, and you made the really intentional decision with your core team to kind of be of service to all your content donors and do all of that for them. You migrated the content. Any page that needed to be rebuilt, you rebuilt it, or your team rebuilt it. And then once that was done, you onboarded content owners to maintain and grow. And we'll talk a little bit about growth in a minute, but I want to rewind back to just like that body of work that you took on, and I'd love for you to share with everybody, like a little bit about how you, how you managed that with the team so that it got done in like a timely, efficient manner.

Yeah, absolutely. We spent a great deal of time before even getting Synthesis six, figuring out what our kind of primary, secondary, tertiary levels of navigation would be. And then we looked, using the analytics from our old site and just a list of all of our content, pairing how that content kind of fit into that outline and Learning more about Synthesis 6 and the features that were going to be available to us, like the table of contents block as well as the guide feature. We figured out that we were going to probably combine a lot of pages. So we wanted to use this as an opportunity to rethink the way that we are thinking about our content and the number of clicks that employees have to go to to get there. We also had a lot of things in our outline that we didn't already have. So for those items, we kind of put them into two categories, attainable or aspirational. That was just what we called them. Those attainable items we decided were things that we already kind of inherently knew as a firm and just maybe hadn't put to paper in a formal way that we could definitely get done for launch and then more aspirational content that we would get to after launch so as not to prolong the process. So, yeah, we decided that we wanted to use this opportunity to really rethink the way that our content was structured. So a lot of copy paste, but A lot of really kind of figuring out what was useful and what wasn't.

And that's a good segue to kind of the second part of this. You said not everything was attainable for launch. There's some stuff that you saved for later. You're now starting to work through that. And I think getting requests from employees about stuff they want to build or have built. So my question is about prioritization. How are you prioritizing the team's time? What are you doing?

What.

What's getting built now and why?

Yeah. So our next big push is something that we are calling studio workspaces. These are places that studios can store their standards, their commonly used documents, things for onboarding and training materials, and much, much more. We do some confidential work, but the hope is that all of these studio spaces are. Will be public to everybody else within the site. And what I'm really hoping is that when people start to see what other people are doing, two things will happen. One, people will realize that the work that we do is actually not that dissimilar, and they can benefit from each other and borrow things from here and there and create new standards for the firm, but also leveraging each other's tools and resources. What a great thing to be able to do. And, you know, starting that by putting everything in. In one place is a strong priority for us. So we're approaching that very much like we did with the migration itself, of trying to create this kind of roadmap for teams to use and have them really focus on planning and organizing the structure ahead of time. It makes the whole thing just a little less overwhelming. And then focusing on how to build and maintain that content after that.

Well, thanks for that. I want to talk a little bit about that structure change that you mentioned. Like, you really reorganized the Internet. You combined things, you created new stuff that's changed. And I know some champions can be a little nervous about making those big changes because people are used to what they're used to. So I'd love it if you could tell us a little bit about how you brought the firm along so that by the time the change actually happened, it was really well received and people were really excited about it.

Yeah, absolutely. We started really early with our leadership team. So kind of that first level outline of navigation we put in front of the leadership team and department leaders and said, here's what we're thinking and got their feedback on that. And then each step of the way, as we added another layer or change something, we would put it back in front of them. If you have not clued into the fact that I might be an over communicator by this point in the webinar, it's a fact. But probably unlike my my rambling here, we tried to make the message really short and digestible but repeat it a lot. That is kind of how we find that people really internalize things and and remember them and then getting into more of like the in depth nitty gritty. We did that with department leaders where we sat down with them and we said hey, this is how we think your content reorganize. What do you think? And also provided them with here's a copy of this. Go back, take the time to think about it, mark it up. If you want to have another conversation, try to make it so that everyone was really included in the process, but that we also got the consistency across the site that having a smaller group of people do it offered. And then for the staff at large, we started a couple months before launch putting out messages about launch via email and then also we created a video for our all staff meeting two or three months prior and we compared the migration that was happening to moving houses. So telling people like hey, we, we're probably not going to have the same set of rooms. That's okay. We're going to put things away in new places that are more logical and easier for you to find. We're going to get rid of the things that we're no longer using. And then in our communication leading up to launch, we kind of always used the phrase like here's what it means for you. So that employees always understood what was happening, what they needed to do to prepare, and for the most part what they needed to do to prepare besides direct content editors was nothing. Take what you want from your employee profile, but of course we can always provide it to you later. So just lots of repetitive messages about what was happening and trying to be as transparent as possible.

Thank you. There are a couple questions coming in around content vetting, so I'd kind of like to advert to those because I think this is connected to all of this. So one, I'll read a couple of them just verbatim. It would be great to understand if the workflow of non vetted content uploads and their visibility prior to vetting and then a related one, what is the team size for maintenance and approval of content? Are they support level or more senior level employees throughout the company? So I think it might be helpful to talk a little bit about like the, you know, who gets to write what, what, if anything gets reviewed, who's doing that review? Kind of, what level of the business are they at? How do they know to do the. Do a review when it's needed?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that maybe with first launch, I may have thought about that kind of validation process more. But I would say that if employees are posting and using in such rapid succession that some sort of review timeline is required, like, you're in really good shape. As a learning organization, we use the hashtags a lot for subscription. So for instance, Kevin subscribes to our Framework lessons hashtag. Every time someone posts something, he then gets an email. If there were to be an issue with anything, he can then, you know, address it with the employee, make the change in the post. No big deal. But there's no other really vetting or review process that goes on beyond maybe, you know, our HR staff saying, like, hey, is this message clear before we post it? We really encourage everyone to share and don't want to put any barriers in place to people sharing. And we want everyone within the firm to know that this is a tool not for a few people to use or not for a certain, you know, level of people to use or seniority, that this is something that we want everyone to feel really encouraged to share on. So as many barriers as we can remove as possible, that's what we do. And the, the people that need to have an eye on things are, you know, they're looking at. They're looking at things all the time, so not really too much of a concern there.

Well, thank you. I'd like to ask a little bit about growth, which, you know, one office to five offices, us and India. Now, I know other people are onboarding offices. Some of them are doing their first office or their second office, you know, maybe the first merger. You've been through this a number of times now, and I'd love it if you could give us your, your advice, your, you know, what you've learned about onboarding offices through the lens of Archie and knowledge management. So when a new office comes online, like, what are you prioritizing for their experience and their onboarding when it comes to Archie and knowledge management?

Yeah. For us getting new hires to know a lot about Archie has been a priority. But to be honest, with our offices, it's been super, super organic in, in terms of adoption. And I think once you have people inherently see this as a really useful tool both for information and for connection, you don't really have to convince them to use it, which is which is pretty awesome. It's also kind of leveled the internal communication playing field. So, you know, you. I think when during expansion, you run the risk of the headquarters office having a lot more senior leadership and maybe getting a lot more of the message. But now we have this platform where everybody is getting exactly the same message. So it's inherently more inclusive of all of our offices and a way that people can share culture and socialization across our offices. So I would venture to say that probably our new offices are even our most frequent posters on Archie. And just by nature of what the platform is and what it's done for us and how it's grown with us, we haven't really had to consciously force that in other offices.

Well, thanks. That's great to hear. Keep up that good work. There's a couple questions about your icon libraries or your icon library. Yeah, you decided to not use the. The icon library available in synthesis. You basically created your own. And it might be helpful to answer these questions for you just to show us that library and. Yeah, maybe just start there.

Sure, I can do that. Let me pull it up.

And while you're pulling it up, there was a clarification about using a graphic designer for this. And I think, yes, you use someone in house who has graphic design ability to create these icons.

Yeah, a lot of the icons we got, frankly, from stock sources online. But my colleague, Hannah Reed, who played a really integral role in building out this whole platform, is a graphic designer and created a lot of the kind of custom iconography and took some of the stock icons that we had and made them applicable for. For mbh. So this is the whole library. You can see she transformed logos, even for software, into our colors for continuity across the site. Just help things look a little cleaner. And then you can see that everything is very clearly labeled with what it is. So I used the example before of help. I know that when I'm building a new page and I'm putting the help icon on, I can just go into the library, search for help, and. And that's the icon that pulls up. So it's a mixed bag of both custom icons, customized stock icons, and just plain old stock items. And we, we wanted them to be mostly solid icons rather than line icons, just because we think that they graphically on the page, they stand out and separate from the text a little bit more. So, yeah, here's our. Here's our icon library. We have it nested hidden under marketing there.

And I recall when we were talking about this in preparation for today, that you guys like kind of went out and I think scoured other icon libraries to see what, what they had in them and then made your list of the things you wanted.

Yep.

There's a question about again, back to information architecture and like the navigation, the mega menus for Archie. The question is how much was straight from KA's template, probably used Essentials plus and how much did you customize?

A lot of it came from KA's template. They had already done a lot of the user testing and vetting of an outline and thinking of things that we hadn't already thought of. So we used a great deal of that. And then in kind of starting to populate that outline, more things came up for us that might be unique to our firm and our offices. So we kind of spliced the two together as more things came up. But particularly for identifying the content that we don't already have, having that outline from KA was really helpful. And having in particular the terminology of those top tabs was huge for us. When we built the first intranet, we went back and forth on what to call things. We changed them a few times. And so having pre identified names for like this is what people understand was super helpful.

Took us a while to figure that out. I'm glad it helped. There's a question about commenting and technical content, so I'm just going to read it to you. Is there a way for any staff member to comment on either supporting or contradicting a post so that your technical director can modify Office standards or respond directly to the comment?

Yes. So tagging somebody in a comment would cause them to get a notification saying that you've communicated a comment. So I would say in our, you know, culture of respect, if there was maybe an issue with the post, it might be something that you would communicate privately rather than posting it. But if it's something, you know, certainly in support of the post, you could go in there. Anybody that's posted that created the post will get a notification saying that you've commented. And then anybody that you tag would get a notification as well. So you could go in and at Kevin and, and ask him to take a look at something cool.

And that kind of brings us to the end of our time. So I'm going to just drop a little bit of information in for everybody about what's coming up next. If you enjoyed Hillary's Internet tour, I recommend you check out our upcoming events page. We have a synthesis spotlight on December 7th with DLR Group. They'll be sharing their intranet and how they're using it. After about a decade of being on synthesis and then looking into January, we have our next set of client roundtables. So our CEO roundtable, our Organizational Development Leader Roundtable, our Learning and Development Leader Roundtable, internal comms it. And then we're introducing a KM roundtable. You can find information about all of those on the link that Chris will paste into chat, if he hasn't already. And then finally, Our annual conference, K Connect, is happening in August 2024. Information about registration, logistics, rough schedule are all available on our website now.

And.

That wraps us up for today. Hilary, thank you so much for taking the time to show us some interesting pockets of Archie and tell us about your process to get here. It's been rich and varied and I know a lot of people on this call have. I can see it in the comments. I found it inspiring and really, really appreciate it. So.

Well, thank you so much for having me. And yeah, again, I really appreciate the generosity that this community of people has lended to me and it was fun to speak with you a little bit today about how we're using synthesis. Thanks, everyone.

Yeah, that's a wrap. Thank you all for joining us and we'll see you next time.